About Mama Lama Ding Dong

Twenty years ago, a mother named Erma Bombeck brought the suburban family out of the closet -- dirty laundry and all. Her candid, hilarious accounts of family life became more than mere books; they became a philosophy. Meet Ayun Halliday, a new generation's urban Bombeck. Creator of the underground parenting magazine The East Village Inky, Halliday's words and drawings detail the quirks and everyday travails of a young Brooklyn family, warts and all. Honest in her parenting foibles and fixed in her opinions on public breastfeeding and the perfect Halloween costume, Halliday validates the complex, absurd wonderousness of being the unpaid caregiver of small children and celebrates the stranger-than-fiction, real-life existence of one modern family.

About Ayun Halliday

Ayun Halliday, a Hoosier New Yorker, is the the sole staff member of the quarterly 'zine, The East Village Inky, which is as much a guidebook to New York City's under-reported attractions as it is an illustrated record of Ayun's thrilling true-life adventures with two children under the age of six. Before becoming a mother, she was an international shoestring gadabout, as chronicled in her recent travel book, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travelers' Lessons Learned Too Late. She looks forward to the not-far-off day when she and her young sidekicks will be more mobile - not that motherhood isn't akin to traveling in a foreign land. Ayun covered that ground in The Big Rumpus: A Mother's Tale from the Trenches. You can find her in Brooklyn with Inky and Milo and their father, Greg Kotis, the man responsible for Urinetown (The Musical), foreign productions of which will take the family to Japan, Korea, London and Madrid in the near future. more

Praise

Mama Lama Ding Dong is positively the best mothering memoir I've read by a straight-tawkin', breast-feeding, xenophilic, world-traveling, Indiana-reared, New York City transplant. I stayed up past my bedtime reading it, no lie. The gal can write. Utne Reader

[Ayun's] strong narrative voice evokes the power and demands of her life and the city in which she lives. Essential reading for all urban mothers. Library Journal